Some segments of our society are now in their third generation of teen-aged binge drinking and the subculture of war against the cops to keep up the practice.

Ayuh. Of course, just wait until one of the little darlings gets drunk off his ass, tries to drive home (hey, he made it the last ten times he did it!) and wraps himself around some roadside obstacle or another.

Oh, then they'll be hot to find somebody else to blame.

Exactly. The police have the same problem dealing with adolescent misbehavior the schools have: they haven't vaguely the time or resources to compensate for society-wide weak parental control, but they catch most of the blame. Teens who do act in a "mature" manner (in the traditional sense of minimizing behavior that harms or places a burden on themselves and others) will feel justifiably oppressed by the system, but the system has only a limited ability to deal with them as individuals, rather than as part of a legally defined group.

Hmm, as a fairly conservative republican I'm going to second the question of why Hillary is considered evil. She strikes me as the last potential voice of sanity in the Democratic party. (excluding marginalised people like Lieberman) I just hope she's machiavellian enough to listen to "new republicans" and abandon the positions that drove them from the democratic party.

I suspect it's because she stood by her man, who is (in the opinion of the most rabid branch of the religious right) the most despicable president we've ever had.

Yup, because he had extramarital sex?

Maybe somebody should tell them that they're in the country that largely considers John Fitzgerald Kennedy to be a demigod.

I was kind of put off by how Clinton apologized for everything the United States had ever done to somebody else for the last two hundred years, but hey. It made people happy but in actuality changed nothing.

Funny, that. Clinton never got over 50 percent of the popular vote either, but for some reason I don't remember the kind of rabid opposition to him that I'm seeing against Bush, except by religious wackos.

Funny, that. Clinton never got over 50 percent of the popular vote either, but for some reason I don't remember the kind of rabid opposition to him that I'm seeing against Bush, except by religious wackos.

You were blessed, then, in having never listened to conservative talk radio in that period. Or read Bob Novak or Charles Krauthammer. There was a thoroughly vicious gossip campaign going on against both Bill and Hillary even before he'd won the nomination. Both of them were already being denounced as "hippies" and "traitors" in the letter columns. I recall being baffled as to why there people appearing there and on TV who hated them so much, as there hadn't been any horrible stories appearing in the newspapers or newsmagazines at that time. It was only later that I discovered how evolved the conservative media network had become over the course of the 80s.

Conason and Lyon's book on The Hunting of the President details some of the bizarre characters and hard-edged conservative hit men who drummed up all the phony Clinton scandals in Arkansas. One of them was actually an very old Jim Crow-racist looking for revenge over the integration of Arkansas 1950s. Other locals included people holding grudges from failed political and business careers in Arkansas; the Washington-based crew tended to be employees of Richard Mellon Scaife, the crackpot right-wing billionaire, or employees of his publishing enterprises. Laura Ingraham, as demented a character as you are likely to find on the TV tube, was one of them. She refers to that entire Scaife crew as "the Elves" and apparently brags to people about what a good job they did destroying Clinton's reputation.

Funny, that. Clinton never got over 50 percent of the popular vote either, but for some reason I don't remember the kind of rabid opposition to him that I'm seeing against Bush, except by religious wackos.

Could be because he never started a war using bad and/or manufactured evidence, didn't invite corporate criminals in wholesale to rewrite the laws, never threatened to corrupt or overturn the constitution, didn't allow unlimited pork through the congress, and didn't run up half-trillion dollar debts. There were other issues on the table when Clinton was running, but nothing vaguely this serious.